


never die, never die

by patrokla



Category: Cobra Kai (Web Series), Karate Kid (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:14:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27060292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: It’s not the first time his sensei has put him in a chokehold.
Relationships: Bobby Brown & Johnny Lawrence
Comments: 9
Kudos: 62





	never die, never die

**Author's Note:**

> Just trying out this whole Cobra Kai fic thing and seeing how it goes...
> 
> Warning for a fairly graphic description of Kreese choking Johnny per the first scene in the Karate Kid 2, and a few other references to physical abuse. 
> 
> Title from "The Ballad of Bull Ramos," by the Mountain Goats.

_I am not ready for the snow, which has already fallen_   
_and melted._

—

Cobra Kai has three rules, and Johnny could recite them backwards in his sleep if you told him to with enough of a bite in your voice. There’s a fourth rule that’s unwritten and unspoken, but just as perfectly ingrained in him as the others. It doesn’t need to be said, because it’s the result of the perfect execution of the first three rules: if you strike first, hard, and with no mercy, you will never lose.

Johnny never loses.

—

The ironic thing is that for the five minutes between handing LaRusso the trophy and walking out to the parking lot, Johnny actually feels pretty hopeful. His jaw hurts like hell, and he knows the second he gets into bed he won’t want to get back out for a week, but that’s nothing compared to the anger and tension of the last few months. He’s spent every day at school feeling like a rabid dog the second he spots LaRusso, straining at the bounds of his sensei’s promise to keep away from the guy until the tournament, just wanting to tear and claw until he stops moving. Losing bites, sure, but there’s a sense of returning equilibrium to it, a real sense of relief. He feels like he’s finally going to get the clean slate he’s wanted since Ali dumped him. 

That (stupid, so fucking stupid) relief lasts until his sensei grips his shoulder, turns him around, and snarls, “Do you want to explain what just happened in there, Mr. Lawrence?”

And then it all comes back in a rush, those rules he’s been trying to live by since the first day he walked into Cobra Kai and saw a chance to never be weak again. Cobra Kai never dies, and it never loses.

Johnny just lost.

—

It’s not the first time his sensei has put him in a chokehold, let Johnny scrabble and heave against the immovable iron bar of his forearm. If you count all the times Sid had grabbed him by the throat when he was younger and weaker, it’s probably around the fiftieth time overall that someone’s choked him. You go through something that much, seems like it should stop being so fucking terrifying. That had been the point of those chokeholds in training, hadn’t it? His sensei had trained him out of flinching in just a few months, but he’d never succeeded in getting him to shake off the paralyzing fear and humiliation that came with asphyxiation. Later, he’ll wonder if that was on purpose, if Kreese was just trying to keep something to terrify him with. At the moment, he’s too busy trying to breathe to think of anything at all.

He barely catches himself on hands and knees after his sensei throws him aside to go after Miyagi. Bobby’s there in an instant, offering a steadying hand that Johnny is too disoriented to refuse, and saying unhelpful things like “You’re okay, Johnny,” and “What the fuck is wrong with him?” as Johnny tries to take too deep a breath and falls into a cycle of painful coughs and strained gasps for air.

LaRusso is there too, watching them with an infuriating combination of horror and pity. Johnny’s seen that look before, from Bobby during training, from his mother at home, even from his own reflection in the mirrored wall of the dojo. It’s the look that had driven him to close his eyes almost immediately when Kreese had locked his arm around his neck, the move of a coward, Kreese would say, but also the only thing standing between Johnny and total humiliation.

Johnny catches LaRusso’s wide, dark eyes for a moment, just long enough to see that expression, and then loses them as he doubles over and vomits on Bobby’s shoes. 

—

He blames Kreese long enough to make it home and limp up the stairs to his room. There, he locks the door, sinks onto his bed, and promptly begins to blame himself. How could he have lost to LaRusso? The kid’s a shrimp with barely any training and an injury, courtesy of Bobby, and Johnny had lost to him? It doesn’t make any sense. He needs to make it make sense. He needs to know how he failed, so he can keep it from happening ever again.

By the time he’s got his headphones jammed over his ears, Randy Jackson’s guitar outpacing the pain in his head and throat, he’s come around to blaming LaRusso. If LaRusso hadn’t kicked him in the head - if he hadn’t soaked Johnny in the bathroom at Halloween - if he hadn’t grabbed Ali’s radio at the beach that evening - if he’d just minded his own fucking business and stopped picking himself up off the floor every time Johnny put him there, then Johnny would’ve come home a champion. He would still have a sensei, and a dojo, and an unbruised throat. 

LaRusso had taken all of that from him, and more besides. Johnny’s dead sure of that by the next morning. He’ll only grow more sure of it over the decades that follow.

—

He’ll come to blame Kreese, too, with the help of the guys. At first he worries that they’ll blame him for pushing them to leave Cobra Kai, but they never seem to. Tommy claims that it’s the second-best decision they ever made, after joining Cobra Kai in the first place, and Jimmy and Bobby seem to agree. Dutch doesn’t say much either way, but with Dutch that’s practically a glowing seal of approval. 

Of course Bobby had technically been the first one to quit, and he’s the first to bring up to Johnny that maybe Kreese had been -

“- a fucking psycho, man,” he says, over beers down at the beach one night.

“Hey!” Dutch snaps, and Johnny echoes it half a second later.

“He was still our sensei,” Johnny says, with a defensive loyalty that’s slowly being drowned in bitterness. “We owe him a lot.”

Bobby looks at him for a long moment, until Johnny turns away to stare at the waves crashing onto the shore, then sighs.

“Sure, Johnny,” he relents, “I know he did a lot for you - for all of us. But what he did at the tournament? That was messed up, and you know it.”

Johnny shrugs and doesn’t make eye contact with Bobby for the rest of the night. It’s not that he disagrees, it’s just that he’s afraid he’ll look over and be met by that pity and horror. He never wants to see that expression directed at him again.

—

He is mad about the trophy. It’s easy to be mad about the trophy, almost as easy as being mad at LaRusso. Second place isn’t as good as first place, but it’s still something. No matter what Kreese said, what Sid continues to say, it’s still _something_. Johnny had lost one match; he’d won a half dozen before that. That should count for something. It should.

It does. It does, until it doesn’t. By his thirties, the only thing keeping the memory of his victories alive are bar fights and the box of dusty All-Valley Under 18 Karate Champion trophies sitting in his closet. He’d won match after match for years, but it’s the loss that comes to define him. He reminds himself, day after day, that he’d lost because of LaRusso, because of Kreese, because the world has had it out for him since the day he was born. 

He doesn’t have to remind himself that he’d lost because he just wasn’t good enough. He knows that like he knows the rules of Cobra Kai: backwards, forwards, and deep in his bones.


End file.
